Monday, May 29, 2017

"The Bronte Plot" by Katherine Reay

Lucy Alling
works for one of the top interior design firms in Chicago. With the owner’s
support, she has begun to expand his business by adding antique books. She
especially loves the Victorians – the Bronte sisters, Mrs. Gaskell (who wrote a
biography of Charlotte Bronte), George Eliot, Herman Melville, Robert Louis
Stevenson, and many others.

She received her
love for reading from her father, and she especially loved his reading of the
Beatrix Potter stories. But her father had long ago abandoned the family, and
Lucy’s only contact is a book sent each year on her birthday. But from her
mother, she knows that her father operates just the other side of the law.

Through the
design store, she meets James Carmichael, a young attorney who shares Lucy’s
love for reading. She helps him find book gifts for his family that contain
special inscriptions. It is a relationship blossoming into love – until James
discovers that Lucy has been writing the inscriptions herself and passing them
off as the work of others – and bumping the price of the book up a bit. Their
relationship blows up. And then James’s grandmother steps in, asking Lucy to
accompany her to England on a buying trip – and to return something she stole
decades before.

Published in
2015,The
Bronte Plot by Katherine Reay
is a romance constructed around classic books, and especially those of
Charlotte and Emily Bronte. It’s not a contemporary retelling of either Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, but it is certainly infused with a love and
appreciation of those works.

The publisher,
Thomas Nelson, is a Christian publisher, but The Bronte Plot makes the themes of faith and forgiveness more
subtle than one might expect from “Christian fiction.” It’s clearly there – Lucy
will have to face the sins of her father, and, more importantly, her own sins,
which extend beyond writing a few inscriptions in old books.

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Professional writer exploring faith and culture, life and work; happily married to Janet, the love of my life; father of two grown sons. Award-winning speechwriter and communication consultant. I am an editor for TweetSpeak Poetry and the author of the novels "Dancing Priest," "A Light Shining," and "Dancing King," and the non-fiction book "Poetry at Work."